00:00:05 Speaker 1: Welcome to this country life. 00:00:06 Speaker 2: I'm your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trot lining and just general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences in life lessons. This country Life is presented by Case Knives on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast the airwaves have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share. 00:00:38 Speaker 1: This Dog Week's special episode is brought to you by Shields. Head to your local Shields for all your sporting dog needs. Tony Tony Peterson, Welcome to this country life. 00:00:54 Speaker 2: Thanks for having me. I'm buddy man. This is a new project we got going. Something's been a lot of fun. Something that you and I both do when we're not on camera or we're not being recorded all the time, we're talking about dogs. You got the Houndation's project going. How's that going? 00:01:09 Speaker 1: Man? Uh? 00:01:11 Speaker 3: It is so much fun because I get to learn a lot about dogs and I'm really enjoying it. 00:01:16 Speaker 2: Well, this is kind of different for for for this country Life the listeners out there. We're going to do some video stuff here and Tony and I are going to be talking about something that's very near and dear to me, and that is the overlap of hounds and retrieving dogs, upland birds and coon dogs like we hunt down South, and there's a lot of overlap there. And when you and I got to talking about this stuff earlier when we were in Bozeman, however many months ago, it was this came up. There's a lot of overlap, right, tell me, I mean, what are your what is your. 00:01:51 Speaker 1: Your views? 00:01:51 Speaker 2: What what is your thoughts on the overlap? 00:01:55 Speaker 1: And how common is it? Really? 00:01:57 Speaker 3: You know, way more common than people would think. And you know, I'm kind of a retriever guy at heart. I love all dogs, but I like retrievers, and so I kind of look through that lens. But when you start to spend time with people who are running dogs, like we've been coon hunting, and that is that is a world that you know, if you look at what my dogs do in the pheasant field and then you look at what your hounds are doing in the woods at night to go tree a coon. On paper, people be like, that's not the same thing at all. But when you when you boil dogs down, you kind of distill it down the foundational level of their performance, you know, out in the field with whatever we're asking them, and then at home or on the way to the field or on the way to the soccer game or whatever, they're they're just dogs, and so their job is different. You know, their temperament might be a little bit different, you know, their their work ethics, discipline, drive, whatever however you want to look at that, but generally they're not that much different. And most of what makes a good dog is sort of ubiquitous across all dogs. And that's what I love about it, is like, you know, if you want a dog that's really awesome at whatever pursuit, hunting ducks or whatever, you've got that upper level stuff that you got to train them because that's jobs specific, but dogs specific stuff like good dogs, that's just they're just good dogs and you kind of get them there the same way. 00:03:17 Speaker 1: And it starts. 00:03:18 Speaker 2: It all starts from their puppies once, you know, with I've trained a few labs way back in the day, back when my brother and I were running a guide service. So it's been I've been out of that game for a long time, but I do know this the foundations of what no pun intended, of what you're working with starts early, way before you ever hit the woods the first time I know with like with Whalen. That dog, that's my coon dog I've had. He sealed be six years old this year in August. I got him when he was six months old. And I looked for six months before I found a dog that I ever went and looked at phone calls, text messages, searching the internet, talking to making phone calls to people that man, I got a friend of a friend, here's his number, call him and it just nothing ever triggered my desire to get up and go look at a dog until until that one. And it was a video that I saw on Facebook, marketplace of all things. And I've got this dog that I've had out there now that I for the last five and a half years, that I wouldn't trade for anything. 00:04:28 Speaker 1: What did you see on that video? It was. 00:04:32 Speaker 2: I talked, I saw people had sent me pictures, people sent me videos of dog with It was something about this one and he was barking at a coon in a cage. 00:04:40 Speaker 1: A Chihuahwah will do that. 00:04:42 Speaker 2: Any kind of dog will bark at a coon in a cage that doesn't do anything other than it let me hear what the dog sounded like as a young pup. But there was something about it that triggered, you know, I'm gonna go look at him. And when I went and looked at him, it was have personalities just like people. 00:05:02 Speaker 1: Right. 00:05:02 Speaker 2: He was real susceptible to talking to to looking at me when I was talking to him. And I put a lot of stock in that to a dog that will look. If a dog is looking at you when you're talking to him, he's trying to figure out what is that you want him to do. Have you found that to be the same with with upland dogs. 00:05:19 Speaker 3: Big time eye contact is huge, you know. And I'm I'm running dogs that are working close you know. I mean you're you're running dogs when you train them, when you live with them, right, that dog's looking you in the eyes and then it's going off to do its job. But that is like a fundamental component of your relationship with them. And so I actually encourage that with as soon as I get a puppy, I'm working on that dog. You you look me in the eyes because we're going to solve problems together our entire life, right, And I want you to know, you know, because everything that I'm going to train is going to have a verbal command and a hand signal with it, because I don't I don't like to make noise when I'm out there hunting if I don't have to, So I like a hand signal for everything. Plus, if they get out and it's windy and they they're not gonna be able to hear me, they'll be able to see. You know, I this exaggerated hand signal. But I'm always working when those pups are young to make sure that they look me in the eyes and they know that I'm a source of direction and they can trust that because I want that throughout our entire relationship because it's so important. And then you see that, you know, you know this when that dogs hits a snag somehow, when you're training something and it's like, can't get through this drill for whatever reason, you introduce something new. If you have a dog that's like I'm gonna look at you, boss, you help me out here, it's like it's you're having a communication with that dog, like you're talking to them in a way that's way more important than you'd think. 00:06:37 Speaker 1: Trust is key. 00:06:37 Speaker 2: Trust is the first thing that if that dog trust that you're going to take care of him, that you're going to look after him, and anything that new comes up. You know, it is my belief forever that the dog's inherent desire is to please the person that feeds them, the person that takes. 00:06:55 Speaker 1: Care of them, the alpha in that relationship. 00:06:58 Speaker 2: And I've always thought that if that dog's inherent desires to do what I want him to do, if he's not doing what I want him to do, I have failed in explaining to him how it is. 00:07:10 Speaker 1: And I think you go at that. People go too fast. 00:07:14 Speaker 2: I get calls, and I get a lot of text messages and emails and social media messages like I've got this five month old dog, I've got this six month old dog or eight month old dog. 00:07:28 Speaker 1: How do I get him treating coons like whalen is? 00:07:30 Speaker 2: And man, you know you're talking that's like getting a toddler to ride a Harley. It is you got to go slow. And patients has always been the key for me to get out of a dog what I want to get out of it, And the patients may be me figuring out how I've got to communicate with him to tell him exactly what it is I want him to do. 00:07:55 Speaker 3: You find that to be absolutely And something you said there I think is just it's so important is when you're developing a dog, we're so impatient, you know. And it's like if you have somebody who's like, why can't my six month old do what your six year old can do? That's just insane. It's like when you talk about your hound dogs and getting to watch them work coons. I feel the same way when I watch my dog's work a pheasants, sleugh or something where it's like they have a certain amount of reps. They have to get in out there doing that before they can be You can't get there any other way. 00:08:33 Speaker 1: You can't. 00:08:33 Speaker 3: You can train a dog really well, but if that dog, if your hound dog doesn't have exposure to raccoons that know how to get away from them and know how to play the game and swim across the river and do all kinds of stuff, they're never going to be well rounded. Just like if I don't get bird contacts with my dogs, all the training is great, I might have a dog at home that's amazing and really well socialized, handsles itself however, right, but it will never be that just banging hunting dog unless gets those reps, and like I look at that, like, you know, if Tiger Woods came up to me and he showed me how to swing a golf club, that would be great instruction, right, right, But it wouldn't change a whole lot until I swung that golf club fifty million times, you know, under pressure, you know, in the backyard on the simulator. 00:09:19 Speaker 2: Or whatever, like they could do it the correct way, right, No, because I always say, you know, practice makes perfect, but that's not correct perfect practice right, perfect. 00:09:30 Speaker 3: Right, And we we look at our dogs. This is this is the hard part. So you know, people people ask me about my dogs, you know, like they'll ask you about your dogs. And I always tell people I give my dogs like two hard years of training. And I'm not talking like I work them to death, Like I want my dogs to love me and work for me like you're talking about before, Like I don't. I don't want a dog to work out of fear. I want it to work out of love. 00:09:51 Speaker 1: Right. 00:09:52 Speaker 3: But I still look at it and I go, we're doing two years of training every day I'm home, and it might be multiple lessons a day. They might only be a couple minutes. But it's just that repetitive nature. And it's like once you start getting into like two three years old, and they those those false positives go away and they know what you're asking of them. That's when you start to move into like, now I'm going to get you as many reps on woodcock and on ducks and on grouse and on pheasants and everything that we can in a variety of different environments. So when that dog slides into that middle aged prime years, I can train to kind of keep things sharp, but that dog knows what it's supposed to do at home and in the field. And we look at that and go, you know, if I tell you that, or I tell somebody that, it's like, oh yeah, two years, no big deal. It's like, okay, now go do that for two years because that's what it takes. It's kind of a discipline thing on our part. But if you do that, then you have you know, seven, eight, nine, ten years of a prime dog before they really start to age out, you know, at least seven or eight years. 00:10:55 Speaker 2: Yeah, routine is you know, if trust is first, routine has got to be coming in there close somewhere. 00:11:09 Speaker 1: A second, A dog. 00:11:12 Speaker 2: That is, if you feed him at the same times every day, if you work him out at the same times every day, at the same at the same level, doing the same things. You know, a good lesson for a young dog for me is going out. When I go out, is him coming to me obviously when I call him? And I'll do that at the beginning with feed I'm calling her name, his name, whatever when at feeding time, and I'm letting them eat when. 00:11:40 Speaker 1: You know, when they get there. 00:11:41 Speaker 2: So that's the associating me calling them to them with something good, which is food. And I'm doing that every day. And then once I get that down, I'm going to add another little step into it. 00:11:52 Speaker 1: You know, I'm going. 00:11:53 Speaker 2: To call him from across the yard, or I'm going to feed him on the tailgate of the truck and get them to go into the to the kindle or what. And it's just stacking those lessons up, those routine things you do every day over a long period of time. That is what it's going to build. You're building off that foundation, that trust foundation, and you're praising a dog when they're doing right, you know, and the praise may just be a simple pat on the head. 00:12:18 Speaker 1: You know, or a rubbing on the ribs or whatever. 00:12:21 Speaker 2: But you stack all those up on top of each other, and eventually you've got a dog that you can call to, you can load him up, and you can go to the woods. And that's when are the fields, and that's when you start applying the other stuff. So once you get that stuff going and he knows he's doing it right, he knows what or she knows what's what's expected of him. And when they're doing good, everything's going right. You only do it once. You don't have any repeats, no do overs. Then you start adding the extra stuff in there, right, And that's an overlap obviously between any kind. 00:12:53 Speaker 1: Of dog whatever, whatever you're hunting. 00:12:56 Speaker 3: Right, you're talking about fair expectations, So not pushing that dog too fast or not introducing something that's just you know, like that that puppy example earlier, or the six month old dog earlier. One of the things that people screw up in that stage all the time is they're like, my dog in the backyard can do this first try trick every time, right, Like if I ask them to do this, it's you know, heal is perfect or whatever, right, And then the minute I try it when we're at the soccer game and there's people all over, there's somebody else walking a dog across there some kind of distraction. Now the dog can't do that. It's like, yeah, that's not a fair ask yet you haven't trained that dog to do that around distractions, and so like fair expectations and then that consistency you talked about, Like, man, you if you look at any dog I'm talking hunting dogs, house dogs, whatever, and there's a there's a hole in their behavior game, almost always it's because it wasn't consistently enforced, right, And you see this all the time. You know, like a lot of times it happens the man will be you know, of the household will train the dog, or sometimes it's the woman or sometimes it's like the teenager's dog or whatever. Whoever's kind of leading that dog and kind of has ownership over it. Whoever else has some level of control at some point of that dog. If they don't stick to that whatever the standard is for that dog, that dog is going to default to the easier way to do it. And you see this in the family dynamics a lot. And to be fair, we do this a lot. Right, If I think that if you looked at how dogs used to get trained before we had cell phones and a constant distraction, I'm certain that we, just as like a in society right now, are less consistent just because of that. Because you take that dog out and you're working those bumpers or whatever, and we have a constant distraction. Those dogs are paying attention to that stuff. Sure, and the minute that you slide a little bit, you're asking them to do sort of an unnatural thing, right, listen to something else, you know. And the minute that you slip a little bit on that and you're not consistent with it, that dog is going to go to the it's going to default to easy mode level that is that you'll tolerate. And that's just I know that sounds like militant, like I'm a like a dictator, but it's not. It's just like it's a fair to do for the dog. So if you're like, I want this behavior out of you, I'm gonna hold myself accountable for like I'm gonna I'm gonna keep you honest with that. If I don't do that for myself and you slip, that's not on you the dog. That's on me as the trainer. Yeah, and we see that. I mean that is like that happens with dogs all the time. 00:15:29 Speaker 2: Well, I think a lot a lot of it comes to if you've got the blood lines and you've got the dog for whatever game that you're after, they're going to have instilled in them the DNA or genetic code to retrieve or point or tree all of that. If you can start with that, you know, I'm not trying to make a poodle into a coon dog. I'm going with something that's that is bred for that over the last one hundred and fifty years. 00:16:00 Speaker 1: So I've more or less got to show them what I don't want him to do. You know, I don't want him to chase a deer. I don't want him to treat a possum. 00:16:08 Speaker 2: I don't want him to go to another dog. I want an independent dog, you know, and I want I want to I'm going to show him or more or less give him the opportunity to do the right things and then correct what I don't want him to do. And absolutely with my dog whaling, when I started, he treated his first one when he was nine months old, and it was because I just kept giving him opportunity after opportunity to go out. Sometimes our hunting trips, Tony wouldn't be it would take me longer to drive. I'll drive forty minutes to a place. And I turned him loose and he did everything right. But he walked out there and he just he didn't know what he was doing. He hadn't figured out, he hadn't crossed the path of that cooncent yet to figure out that was what was interesting to him. But he may have bumped on a deer and send him a message through a collar, you know, a distraction, a little stimulus, and he's like, okay that I didn't like that. That wasn't enjoyable, it wasn't painful. It broke his concentration. He put his nose back on his on the. 00:17:13 Speaker 1: Ground to go look for something else. 00:17:15 Speaker 2: And when he chased that and it went to fruition, and I get to the tree and there's a coon up there. He's getting all the praise and he's like, holy cow, where did this come from? 00:17:25 Speaker 1: This is good? This is great stimulus. 00:17:28 Speaker 2: I want to keep doing this and eventually, I mean it doesn't take them long. 00:17:32 Speaker 1: They're going to. 00:17:33 Speaker 2: Put that put that puzzle together and know that when they leave the house and he's got that collar old and we're traveling, it's getting dark outside. 00:17:41 Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I know what I'm supposed to do. 00:17:43 Speaker 3: I mean what you're talking about there, that's, you know, especially to the sporting dog crowd or the hunting dog crowd, that's we kind of laser focus on, like what's the mission. I love to pheasant hunt, so I get a dog that should kick up pheasants and bring him back to me when I shoot him. But when you talk about that coup dog, like you go, you go, get a specific kind of dog for this specific task. But when you're taking them out there and when you're training, there's a million different variables coming into play that are gonna affect your time out there. So in your head, before you get that puppy, you're like, I'm gonna I'm gonna treat a billion coons with this dog and it's gonna be amazing. But really, when you get out there, it is that deer that jumps, and the fence and the dog getting out there too close to the highway and all of these other things that you're like, oh, this is that dog wants to tree coons. I just need to facilitate that and get them the reps that's gonna that's gonna come because it's in the blood. It's like my dog's my dog's from the jump, love pheasant wings and duck wings, and like theyre they want to go out and do that all the time. What I gotta worry about is if we run into a porcupine up in the big woods, can I recall that dog? If that dog takes off after a rabbit out there, you know, jack rabbit, when we're out somewhere hunting, can I call that dog back? Like all of this extra stuff that we sort of forget about is probably equally as important as like that mission specific training, where like I want you to be a dog that can be steadying the duck line, take a perfect line, follow the hand signals. 00:19:12 Speaker 1: All that stuff's super important. 00:19:13 Speaker 3: But all the other stuff of like, okay, that duck got so far out and it's diving and now we're in two foot rollers and it's thirty five degrees out. 00:19:21 Speaker 1: You got to come. 00:19:22 Speaker 3: Back or whatever, Like all of that extra stuff is just as important and we sort of forget it. But man, it's just a part of the whole thing. 00:19:30 Speaker 2: Yeah, it is, and it's a journey. It's a journey for It's been a journey for me. 00:19:36 Speaker 1: I mean, a. 00:19:36 Speaker 2: Lifelong hound hunter from when I was just a little kid. But it has been a journey with me of this dog and watching the progression. I get the most enjoyment out of watching the light bulb go off over their head when they figure out what their purpose in life is. Along with being a member of our family. It is just an added bonus that he's a good hunting dog or flushing dog or pointing dog. Either way, it's a dual purpose thing that fills a big hole in everybody's life. But it's hard, it's not easy. It takes time. It doesn't take a lot of time, but it takes a commitment every day, every day. There's no facet of having hunting dogs that I don't enjoy. 00:20:21 Speaker 1: I enjoy getting up and going and feeding them in the morning. 00:20:24 Speaker 2: I enjoy doing everything with them, spending time with them. It is, but it's a commitment, you know, and I get I see, you know, dogs. 00:20:36 Speaker 1: For sale all the time. You know, I just I got him. 00:20:39 Speaker 2: He's a year old and I hadn't had a chance to hunt him, right, You know and I but it's somebody that wont that likes to hunt, but maybe their job too much of a commitment and that they can't spend the time necessary to train a dog. My advice is always, look, they're started dogs everywhere. There's people that make a living getting dogs started and going in that direction. And I know there's upland dogs like that too, oh for sure. Because you know, if you don't, if that's not interest you, if you're impatient, if if you've got any impatience whatsoever, the way to go is not with a puppy, because not every puppy it's gonna make it right. 00:21:19 Speaker 1: You know. 00:21:19 Speaker 2: I got my friend Michael Roseman that I hunt with all the time. He calls me the luckiest guy that ever lived. Because when I brought that dog home, when I brought whaling home, my wife Alexis and my daughter Bailey, they were like, oh, he's here to stay, and I'm like, Jesus, please let this dog tree a coon, otherwise I'm just gonna be feeding him. Turns out he turned into a pretty good coon dog. My advice would be to put your keep your dog pen a long ways from the house, so the so the wife and kids can't see him. But people that are not committed to that or don't get lucky like I did, then you've got a dog that you've got to you know, you got to sell somebody else, because you know, one man's trash is another man's treasure. Somebody else can do something with that dog. But my advice is always been I'm sure yours would be too. To look after a dog that's been started somewhere. It may be a little bigger investment, but it may be a little cheaper in the long run. 00:22:17 Speaker 1: Right well. 00:22:17 Speaker 3: And I mean, you know, if you want to, if you want a dog where the odds are pretty good, it's going to do what you want. That's all about the bloodline, yeah, you know, And I mean you really have to pay attention to that because you know, I'm pretty good buddies with Tom Doc and the dog trainer, and he's I remember when I went through two dogs ago. I can't remember exactly how it came up, but he was looking for a for a pup for me and we were going to go look at a litter and I had two year and a half old daughters at home and my wife, and he said, listen, don't go look at a litter till I find the litter that you need to look at, because he's like, if you go look at a litter of lab puppies, you're getting a lab puppy. And he's like, it might not be the dog you need. And you see that a lot. You know, people get a little impulsive about it. You talked about taking six months to find Whalen. I go through a pretty good process to get my puppies because I don't want, you know, when that dog comes into my house with my kids and everything, like, that dog's that's my dog's that's whatever I'm going to work with, and so it's it is an important part of it, but it's also just you just want to start working with you know what you need to get the most out of that dog. And you know, you said something he talked a little bit about like how you you love the aspect of every aspect of owning your coon dogs. And I think that that's like, I think that's an important thing to acknowledge. We look at them and go, I want this dog because I love dogs. I want this dog because I want to kill limited roosters every day from October to December or whatever. But it's like you have that dog three hundred and sixty five days a year, and that dog needs you to do what it wants to do, right, Like it wants to work, it wants to like learn, it wants to do those things. And if you embrace that part of it, that year round things like, that's that's like the best part. You know, the hunting is awesome, right, but just watching a dog develop and figuring out how to work with it and doing some you know, doing some drills or something that you're like, I never thought a dog could do this, or I never thought I would be able to train a dog up to this level. That long game stuff with it is what makes it so special. That's that's when you get those dogs that you're like, yeah, you want to brag to your buddies that they always treat the coon or they always get the limited roosters, But really it's for you and for that dog to have that life together. That's just it's just at a different level. 00:24:34 Speaker 1: It is, for sure, and it's so rewarding. It's such a pleasure. 00:24:39 Speaker 2: I get, I promise you I get more out of watching that dog hunt and treat coons than probably he does, and he acts like he really likes it. 00:24:49 Speaker 3: He seems to like it. 00:24:50 Speaker 1: Yeah, he does for sure, Tony. I appreciate you being here. Man. This is something new that me started. 00:24:57 Speaker 2: We're gonna have some other stuff on your feet, and I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes. And come back. Maybe now that you've been down here, Kona and I can come up there and we. 00:25:07 Speaker 1: Can we can do something up north. Yeah, you should come up. 00:25:10 Speaker 3: You might fall through the ice, but it'll be it won't be that deep, buddy. 00:25:14 Speaker 1: Okay, I'll go. 00:25:15 Speaker 3: I appreciate all right, thanks brother, Okay,